Nearly four decades after his father founded the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell Jr. is presiding over the biggest crisis the modern evangelical coalition has ever had to face.
With his endorsement of Donald J. Trump for president on Tuesday, the younger Mr. Falwell has dismayed his fellow conservative evangelicals and baffled many others, who think it’s counterintuitive that Mr. Falwell would endorse this thrice-married reality television star.

Mr. Falwell is the president of his father’s Liberty University, seen by some as the official voice of evangelicalism. Does this mean the whole movement will follow — or at least most of it?

The answer is no, and the reason is that while the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. was long the face of the religious right — the go-to guy for reporters, the talking head on Americans’ television screens — his son has never played that role, even within evangelicalism. Mr. Falwell is influential, certainly, but today no one can lay claim to such a monolithic status. Even his own constituents, graduates of Liberty University, have questioned his judgment in endorsing Mr. Trump. The Trump endorsement demonstrates just how fractured evangelicals have become in this presidential contest, and how none of the candidates can count on a single leader to unite the evangelical vote behind him.

Over the decades since the elder Falwell helped start the modern religious right, politicized evangelicalism has expanded beyond a handful of organizations, producing a multitude of spokesmen, among them pastors, activists, televangelists, authors and opportunists. It’s now almost impossible to be the singular face of 21st-century evangelicalism. The movement still wields significant power, particularly in Republican politics, but the dalliance with Mr. Trump threatens to undermine its unity.

One 2016 candidate, Ted Cruz, is competing for that mantle, but continues to struggle to keep up with Mr. Trump. Another, Marco Rubio, represents a dissenting movement within the religious right, one that strives to produce a candidate who eschews harsh culture-war rhetoric while maintaining staunch opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Mr. Rubio is trailing both Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz — a sign that perhaps voters are not quite ready to follow the lead of some evangelical elites who see the senator from Florida as their top choice.

A good segment of evangelical voters appear to have blithely abandoned both the Christian-nation candidacy of Mr. Cruz and the kinder, gentler social conservatism of Mr. Rubio in favor of Mr. Trump, who is unabashedly ignorant of the biblical imperatives that form the foundation of evangelical culture and politics. That Mr. Trump is a Presbyterian and not evangelical is not the issue. It’s that he doesn’t pretend to understand evangelicalism, or even his own mainline Protestantism, failures that would have been, in recent elections, disqualifiers for evangelical Republican voters.

Last year Mr. Trump couldn’t cite a favorite Bible verse when asked by reporters, a no-brainer part of interview preparation for a Republican presidential candidate, even if it’s disingenuous. He referred to a communion wafer as “my little cracker” while boasting that he never seeks God’s forgiveness. Mr. Trump is so confident of his sway over Iowa’s coveted evangelical voters that this week he called Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent evangelical figure in the state, a “phony.”

Yet for months, polls have shown Mr. Trump attracting a quarter to a third of white evangelical support. A Pew Research Center survey released on Wednesday found that half of white evangelicals believe that Mr. Trump would make a “good” or “great” president. Although Mr. Cruz and Mr. Rubio are viewed by more voters as “religious” than Mr. Trump is, both run behind him among white evangelicals as a potentially “good” or “great” president.
While this level of evangelical support could be sufficient to propel Mr. Trump to the Republican nomination, the real story of his rise among evangelical voters is not that he has monopolized them (he hasn’t), but rather how he has brought divisions among them into public view.

Mr. Trump’s cultivated image as a tough guy who will “make America great again” is a draw for some evangelicals, as Mr. Falwell’s endorsement shows, not to mention the one he got from the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In his endorsement, Mr. Falwell called Mr. Trump “a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again.” There was no extolling of Mr. Trump’s Christian virtue.

Contrast that with the endorsement of Mr. Cruz, a few hours later, by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, arguably the pre-eminent political advocacy organization of the religious right. Mr. Perkins, who made his announcement on the Fox News program of Mr. Trump’s bête noire, Megyn Kelly, called Cruz “a constitutional conservative who will fight for faith, family and freedom.” Mr. Perkins highlighted Mr. Cruz’s defense of Christians’ religious freedom, declaring that the senator from Texas “will defend our right to believe and live according to those beliefs.”

Six months ago, the conventional wisdom was that these religious freedom issues — such as religious exemptions for employers from providing insurance coverage for contraception or exemptions from providing catering or photography services to same-sex couples — would form the core of a Republican candidate’s appeal to evangelicals, alongside opposition to abortion and federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Mr. Trump doesn’t even pay lip service to them.

Mr. Trump’s standing among evangelicals shows just how little those issues matter to a good many erstwhile culture warriors, at least when picking a president. If he turns out to be their standard-bearer, this once-cohesive movement will have to spend this election season asking itself what it really means.

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